


Redemption Lies Plainly in Truth

by dilapidatedcorvid



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Literary References & Allusions, Self-Hatred, Self-Reflection, tltexchange2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 15:14:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28620159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilapidatedcorvid/pseuds/dilapidatedcorvid
Summary: As she fell, she cupped your face as she was so fond of doing, and she held your fretting hands by your fingertips, and she smeared her precious blood like anointing oil on your knuckles and on your palms and on your wrists and on your lips, her final benediction as she died on the cold marble floor in your arms. Smiling. Like she was going home to God. She had died for your indelible sin and you had spit and cursed and sobbed, foetal, over her broken body as if you could bring her back if only you wept hard enough.or, Mercymorn has a headache.
Relationships: Mercymorn the First/Cristabel Oct
Comments: 12
Kudos: 49





	Redemption Lies Plainly in Truth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [exmakina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exmakina/gifts).



> [@exmakina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exmakina)'s prompt: Mercymorn/Cristabel angst
> 
> A prompt after my own heart, given how much angst gets churned out of my brain. Hope you enjoy.

Silence, as you have learned over the past myriad, is rarely silence at all.

The soles of your boots click along the floor of the Mithraeum, your home for too many damned years. The hallway stretches out before you, its ceiling high and curved like rib bones, a long, steel sternum running the length of the corridor. Underneath your feet, the ship creaks and groans like it’s alive, an unholy abomination of a thing, suspended in nothing this deep out in space. The sound of your footfalls is loud, the sounds of your breathing are loud, the dull hum of the engines and the faintly buzzing lights are loud.

_Goddamn it._

The noise creeps into the edges of your awareness like an ever-present static, just mild enough the throbbing behind your eye isn’t worth the bother of fixing, just strong enough that you don’t remember the last time your frontal lobe wasn’t pulsing with a low, persistent headache. _God_ you hate this ship. If you could live the rest of your life on some godforsaken crappy little planet that didn’t hum with mind-numbingly predictable engine sounds and flickering fluorescent tubes, you would. You’d give up this whole stupid little game and seclude yourself into hermithood for all eternity until some Resurrection Beast came and ate you whole and did away with this immortality nonsense.

She would have hated that.

Your head hurts again. You stop walking and lean on the curved wall to your right, pressing your fingers against your temples. Gently, you coax neurochemicals forth in an effort to tamp down the impending migraine before it starts, but like a particularly nasty intestinal worm, once it takes hold it loathes to leave. It throbs behind your left eye and you hiss angrily, rubbing two fingers into the frontal bone above the orbital ridge. Why God couldn’t have rid you of such pesky irritations as migraines when you ascended to Lyctorhood, you’d never know.

There are– in addition to entirely too many headaches for any being, mortal or not, to deal with – a handful of other downsides to living forever. Or, at least, living until your brain was severed from your spine at the stem and the whole of you ceased to exist by reason that you simply could not reconstruct yourself using your sense of self if you didn’t not have a brain by which to process it at all. That, or the River took you. So, no, not truly immortality, but you wouldn’t suffer yourself to expend your time or your energy to expound the intricacies and nuances of your functional immortality.

For such a functionally immortal being, you are so often so awfully tired and ever running out of time.

One: you would watch as your friends, your family, and everyone you loved and hated pass on in what would be the blink of an eye and leave you as the loneliest being left stranded, left afloat in the blank nothingness of space for all conceivable eternity.

This one, you had been prepared for. This one, all of you had been prepared for when you came, sat at God’s feet at Canaan House in robes of white. All sixteen of you. You, you and your cavalier, who had followed with reckless abandon after the man who shouted out to you from the shore on a day so foul and fair you had not seen and said: “Mercymorn and Cristabel, all hail! Come, follow me”. You knew nothing, then; you were just an infant who could not conceive of anything but greatness at the other side of the door your key unlocked.

Oh, you gentle fool, you. Don’t you know that everything comes at a price?

Two: you make too many mistakes. Too many for any mortal to make. Too many for any immortal to make. Ten thousand years’ worth of debt and of sin weighing on your shoulders and your chest and crushing your intervertebral discs are not enough to kill you.

When you close your eyes, you see her brilliant eyes looking down at yours, liquid amber you could drown in, shining. Bright. Brilliant. She cups your cheeks excitedly and tells you with reverent breath of Alfred’s theories, of God and his infinite plans, and you turn your face into her palm and close your eyes, her voice carrying too much joy for you to ever want to crush it. When you close your eyes, you see her expression when Augustine walked into the dining hall for breakfast, his brother conspicuously absent; you have not forgiven yourself for not recognising the zeal and set determination in her face for what it was.

You fool, you imbecile. You wouldn’t have known then—the Cinque brothers’ eyes were too close in their slate grey colours to turn turbid and brackish—but if you had, would you have run? Would you have stopped her at all?

Three: you begin to forget things you swore you would never forget. The important things. Things like which of her upper canines were pushed further forward than the other, the one that pressed against your lip when you kissed her, the one she’d wink and bare like a tease at the dinner table when she thought no one was watching. Things like what order she’d address herself, Alfred, and Valancy—no, Valancy, herself, and Alfred?

You smile bitterly despite the dull ache in your head. The truth, you know now, is that you had lost her long before the beginning of the Eightfold Word. No, you had lost her when you were still watching her from across the room when she bumped shoulders with beautiful Valancy and dipped her face to coy Augustine’s ear and whispered smug secrets, and looked at God like a zealot, a burning in her eyes you never managed to elicit for yourself. You had lost her when she had been Mary at her Saviour’s feet, and you were Martha, putting together pieces for a puzzle you never stepped far enough back to see the scope of. She loved you. But she had always loved John with a fire you knew would never know the brilliant heat of.

By the time you had awoken with your head on her breast and her arm slung warm and heavy around your shoulders, she was good as gone.

It had been your own distractions—the surge of gamma aminobutyric acid and oxytocin that had flushed you warm and pleasing, rubbing your cheek against her breastbone and insisting on just five more minutes, the serotonin and dopamine flooding your system when you stood in your laboratory and your theories began to fall into place one after the other, a cog slotting seamlessly between the gaps in your perfect machine of perpetual motion, this satisfaction short only of the day you discovered that the top of your head fit perfectly into underside of Cristabel’s jaw, and her arms settled around your hips as easily as the grip of her rapier in her palm. This bliss, this joy, it had made you falter, and in a moment of momentary lapse, had made you turn your eyes away from your Cristabel because her smile was too radiant for a mere mortal like you to witness in all its glory.

And when you turned back, you found that you had pushed the end of your rapier into her chest where you had pressed your ear not but hours ago, and her perfect, unblemished smile was stained with blood. Bodies always gave so easily under the sharpened blade of a rapier, the threads of muscle bowing gracefully at the intrusion and sighing in expiring relief as if its very creator had said, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Cristabel, your angel made flesh, the holiest and most beloved of all creation, was no different.

As she fell, she cupped your face as she was so fond of doing, and she held your fretting hands by your fingertips, and she smeared her precious blood like anointing oil on your knuckles and on your palms and on your wrists and on your lips, her final benediction as she died on the cold marble floor in your arms. Smiling. Like she was going home to God. She had died for your indelible sin and you had spit and cursed and sobbed, foetal, over her broken body as if you could bring her back if only you wept hard enough.

It is the only memory that you do this for; every time you recall it, you retrace the exact patterns of neurons that go off in your brain in perfect order, accurate to the attosecond, anything to keep yourself from rewiring this pathway, from rewriting this memory, from tarnishing it.

You sordid beast of naïveté, you wretched excuse of a creature, a festering curse upon the myriad of myriads you live to see! This memory of her is the only thing of hers you willingly consume, and even now, you desecrate it by even conjuring up her sacred name in your perverted mind, allowing your sullied and unclean lips to form the shape of syllables you hurt to speak. If an angel came with burning coals it would not be for forgiveness, but to sear your lips into blissful silence evermore. 

You pull your murderer’s hands away from your face and you rub your thumb into your palm as your feet continue onwards, along a path it has traced too many times. Out, damn spot. And for what? You now sit alone on your throne, the Thane of your own Condemnation, while her soul burns and burns and burns to keep you warm, to keep you alive. Your blessing is your curse, and you have everything the both of you had ever wanted. This was the pact of your youth; where you went, she would go. But not like this. Not like this.

One of these days, you hope that the forest made of the tinder you have reduced her to marches on your idolatrous pedestal and finds you from this mortal coil, untimely ripp’d. But you are no Lord, and Birnam Wood was razed long before you were even mortal. So instead you live your endless life as punishment for your indelible sin and you pay your paltry penance to pall a priceless penalty.

You had had the choice to stop.

Absent of cause or excuse, you are complicit in your own misery.

As you approach the kitchen doorway on your right, a sparking of thanergy catches your eye and you frown at the fresh filigree of bone that embellishes the doorway to the kitchen. An upgrade by any measure. They radiate thalergy in horrible cascading waves the way new bone always does, and from this portal of oss, a body is violently spit out by a dozen skeletal arms, crashing into the floor at your feet.

It is your sister Lyctor, the Saint of…of God knows what. Her facepaint looks like it has been worn through a slip-and-slide and she lays there, coughing and gasping wetly with what is undeniably the Saint of Duty’s rapier and spear both lodged into her torso, sticking out of her at grotesque angles. She curls up around her broken body, foetal at your feet, and trembles, rocking on her back on the scabbard. She bleeds, and she bleeds, and she bleeds, and shows no sign of healing, no sign of staunching the hemorrhaging. She turns her head and retches and you feel something suspiciously like sympathy crawl up your spine and nestle in the space of your cervical curvature. The taste of grief—bile stinging the mucus lining—is no stranger to you.

She rocks again, a feeble attempt to get off her back, perhaps, or maybe just writhing in pain, half alive, half a Lyctor. A dead cavalier’s blood on her hands and ten thousand years worth of interest in guilt to come, and for what?

If it’s any consolation, you envy that she cannot burn her cavalier’s soul. How pathetic of you.

(What you did not know then, is that six months later you would touch your infant sister Lyctor’s head and you would feel the disparity in thalergetic output from the temporal bone and the inconsistency in the location of gyri and you would mask your sympathy with irritation, and when you sat in your quarters later that night, you would rage at God in your silent, stewing thoughts. Was it not enough that you had paid the toll? Did a child have to do the same?

You did not envy her after that.)

The pool of blood underneath her grows and you take half a step back so the bottom of your boots are not stained. You wonder what her cavalier’s name was.

In the kitchen, the Saint of Duty pushes himself to his feet, covered in bone dust. He looks at you with dead brown eyes and you want to scream at him, to slap him across his gaunt and sunken cheeks, to grab him by the collar of his opalescent cloak and shake him and ask him, “Isn’t it enough? Don’t you hurt enough? Have you not left enough bodies in your wake?”

But your body does not move, and your lips do not form these thoughts into words. Instead, with soul-consuming weariness, you say: “Gideon.”

The infant’s ears begin to bleed.

**Author's Note:**

> Where would I be without my beta reader, [@searchforthescars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/searchforthescars)? Still contemplating whether a dash or a semicolon goes where, probably. Thank you for your continual work, the readability of my stories is utterly indebted to you.
> 
> Title from "Achilles Come Down" by Gang of Youths
> 
> Tumblr: [frumpkinspocketdimension](https://frumpkinspocketdimension.tumblr.com)  
> Discord: SweetBabyRae#0967


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